The invention relates to an agricultural harvesting machine with a header designed as a front harvesting attachment for cutting and picking up crop and a driver assistance system for controlling the header.
The agricultural harvesting machines can be combine harvesters, forage harvesters, balers or the like and are regularly adaptable to harvesting different types of crop by equipping the machine with correspondingly different front harvesting attachments. In the case of a combine harvester, the front harvesting attachment (i.e., the header), comprises at least one reel, a cutterbar table, a knife bar disposed on the cutterbar table and an intake auger, which feeds cut crop to a feeder of the harvesting machine. Assigned to at least a portion of these components are drives, with which corresponding header parameters can be set, such as, for example, “knife bar height,” “cutting angle,” “cutterbar table length,” “reel position,” “intake auger speed,” “reel speed” or “cutting frequency.”
During harvesting operation, the reel guides the crop over the knife bar, on which the crop is cut. The cut crop lands on the cutterbar table, from where it is transported by an intake auger to the feeder. The cut crop is transferred to the feeder in a central region of the intake auger. For this purpose, intake auger fingers are provided in the central region of the intake auger, which fingers extend out of the intake auger in a controlled manner in order to pick up the cut crop and subsequently feed it to the feeder. Such an arrangement is described in DE 78 26 143 U1, for example. In this case, the extension angle at which the intake auger fingers extend out of the intake auger can be adjusted relative to the roller rotation. The further, adjustable header parameter “extension angle of the intake auger fingers” therefore results.
The optimal setting of the header parameters is highly significant not only for cutting and picking up, but also for all the downstream processes. In the case of a combine harvester, these downstream processes are, inter alia, threshing, separating, and cleaning.
An entire series of criteria exists on the basis of which the quality of the function of the header can be evaluated. The first objective is to minimize the losses at the header itself. Such losses resulting directly at the header are, for example, “pick-up losses,” “cut crop losses,” “bouncing grain losses” or the like. In addition, each of the set header parameters influences the aforementioned downstream processes, i.e., threshing, separating, and cleaning, in particular, in the case of the combine harvester. Due simply to the number of header parameters, it becomes clear that setting the header parameters in an optimal manner is a highly complex task.
In a known agricultural harvesting machine (DE 10 2008 032 191 A1), a driver assistance system is provided for controlling, inter alia, the header. The driver assistance system ensures that the crop stream is steady by determining different header parameters on the basis of the data from a crop stream sensor. This optimization is therefore directed only to the relationships prevailing at the header itself. A similarly fixedly configured optimization is disclosed in WO 2014/093814 A1, which relates to a forage harvester.